Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Carver has enjoyed increasing popularity both at home and abroad, humor and masculinity construction in his short stories seem both disproportionately ignored. This paper first focuses on the humor in four of Carver’s short stories and then discusses the relationship between humor and masculinity construction. Two theories are employed to back up my argument: The incongruity theory of humor and Judith Butler’s re-conception of gender as performatively constructed and masculinity as tenuous and fragile. It is true that Carver’s short fiction is full of emotional turmoil and hopelessness, but such peculiar bleakness is often mitigated with subtle humor, subdivided into verbal play, situational humor, and humorous characterization. These narrative strategies find expression in “A Serious Talk,” “One More Thing,” “Preservation,” and “Careful.” Such an observation means the general criticism that things start looking up in Cathedral, Carver’s collection of his later period, needs qualifying: the first two stories come from What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, Carver’s mid-phase collection, although the last two are from Cathedral. The association between humor and masculinity construction in Carver’s short fiction should no doubt open up a new critical space in Carver studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".